GigaOM

Armed with a belief in the wisdom of crowds, the Library of Congress has made two of its photo collections available on Flickr. The government library hopes that more people will be able to view the photos online — and help librarians organize them by way of user-generated tags. Check out the pilot project at a new Flickr area called The Commons, where other institutions can also post their public photos for sorting and posterity. Given that some of the 3,000 photos submitted by the Library are missing information, the librarians hope users can identify people and places, thus contributing more information for historians. If this project works, perhaps the Library will feel comfortable releasing more than .02 percent of its archives onto the web.